


come and talk to me (shut me up)

by susiecarter



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Extended Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: 5 Times, Caretaking, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 06:03:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14948946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susiecarter/pseuds/susiecarter
Summary: Post-BvS, pre-JL: Five conversations Diana and Lois could have had, and one time there wasn't all that much talking left to do.





	come and talk to me (shut me up)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hidden_Pineapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hidden_Pineapple/gifts).



> You said you were all right with f/f, Hidden_Pineapple, and hopefully this has enough character development (or at least character exploration), humor, and canon-style plot lurking in the background to be a reasonably entertaining ride. :D You didn't mention specifically whether or not you'd seen Justice League, so if you haven't this might be a little bit spoilery; but it also plays relatively fast and loose with the timeline and shouldn't require any JL knowledge to be readable. I hope you like this, and that you've had a great F5K! ♥
> 
> Title borrowed from the lyrics of Joni Mitchell's [Talk to Me](http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=31).

 

 

**zero. (the first time, but it doesn't count.)**

Black dust, red light, scorched rubble. Explosions, but only one of them matters to Lois.

She clings to Clark's body, his blood on her hands, the goddamn uniform smooth and slick and alien under her fingers. And yes, someone else is standing there. A woman, tall and armored, watching.

But Lois can't bring herself to care about it, can't bring herself to care about anything except Clark's slack face in front of her, and they don't look at each other, don't speak to each other.

Hell of a first meeting, if you can call it that when they don't even know each other's names.

 

 

**interlude.**

Lois decides what she's going to do next on the day of Clark's funeral.

It takes time to get it all in motion. When she gets back to the city, she gives herself a day to just be: to let the tears seep the way they want to, to be red and puffy and unhappy, to lie on her bed and watch the light move along the walls and not do a goddamn thing.

And then in the morning she gets up, and goes to see Perry.

He's not expecting her. She can tell that by the way his eyes widen, the sudden need he feels to clear his throat.

But he covers for it all right. Doesn't double-take, doesn't splutter. "Lane," he says, and gets up from behind his desk, crosses the room and closes his office door gently behind her.

She smiles at him—it can't help but come off as pretty perfunctory, but then she imagines he wasn't expecting any better from her this soon after everything. She tells him she's going to need some time, and she looks him right in the eye while she does it, because if she didn't he'd know it was bullshit. And then she braces herself, and says it.

He blinks at her. "Cat stories," he repeats.

"Cat stories," Lois agrees firmly. "Something—easier. Just for a while, Perry, I promise. I need the work, I need something to do with myself. But I can't—it can't be anything that matters. I'm not going to be all there," and when she says that, carefully, quietly, his face softens.

"Sure," he says.

"And if it was anything that mattered, I'd want to be all there for it. I don't want a leave of absence, I don't want to get away from it all. I love working here, and I want to keep this job. But I can't do what I used to do the way it should be done, not right now."

"So—cat stories," he murmurs again, and this time it's resigned, understanding: following the steps she's led him through to their conclusion.

He turns away, rubbing at his mouth, and takes a few strides around the office. She doesn't rush him; Perry likes to walk and think at the same time, likes to be in motion.

And then he swings back around, looks at her, and says, "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay, Lane. Cat stories. Human interest. You want fluff pieces, you got them." He says it like he can't quite believe he's hearing it, shakes his head and props his hands on his hips and then blows out a long breath. "The things I do for you, I swear."

And it probably is going to be a pretty hard sell to the board, Lois thinks suddenly. Keeping her on, paying her that Pulitzer-Prize-winner salary, to sit at her desk and churn out fluff pieces that were never supposed to have Lois Lane's name attached to them. He doesn't even know why, hasn't even pressed; he's just taking her word for it that this is what she needs, and making it work.

Without even really meaning to, she finds herself crossing the office in a rush to hug him. "Thanks, Perry," she says into his shoulder, and he coughs and clears his throat and then pats her gingerly on the back.

"Yeah, yeah, all right," he says, "now cut that out before somebody sees you," and she lets go of him and swipes at her eyes, laughs—smiles, and this time it's for real.

 

*

 

A couple hours a day is more than enough for a good cat story—less, technically, but about half of that time is taken up just sitting there getting ready to force the words out, trying to scrape together a good angle or come up with something she hasn't already said five different ways about cats.

And then, once she's got a draft hammered out and has spent plenty of time looking miserable and unproductive where other Planet staff can see her, she stands up and goes for a little walk, pulls out her notebook, and gets to work.

Best way to keep everything secure, for now: do it longhand, so she doesn't have to worry about who might have access to the Daily Planet servers, or how to turn her own laptop into Fort Knox.

The day it all happened is still mostly a blur. When she'd been looking Lex Luthor in the face, she'd mostly been thinking about what a whackjob he was, how far she had to fall, that Clark had to be listening. And then everything had gone so wrong so fast, a black enough cloud to blot the rest of it out for a while.

But Martha had needed her help, her help and that woman in the armor and _Batman_ , of all people—getting Clark out of there, away from the port and back to Kansas. And Lois had realized, belatedly, that she didn't even know what Martha was _doing_ there, and it had all come out.

Lex Luthor, again. He knew about Clark, somehow, or he wouldn't have known where to find Martha, who she was or where she worked. He knew about Clark, he knew about Superman, and Batman had been involved in some way Lois didn't quite understand; because he'd told Martha he was a friend of Clark's, and she'd believed him—she hadn't seen him standing over Clark on a pile of rubble, with that goddamn green spear pressed to Clark's face.

But Lois had. And it's just like Nairomi, Jimmy's slumped body and a bullet in her notebook, clues scattered right and left and just waiting for Lois to come along and line them up with each other, put them in order and click them into place. Luthor had been planning all this, had known more than any of them had realized.

And there's nothing Lois hates more than knowing there's something she doesn't know.

She's got it all written out as best she can figure it, sprawling webbed diagrams crossing half a dozen pages, exclamation points and underlines, blank boxes full of question marks. Narrowing down the missing pieces, the weakest links, is how she's going to work out where to start digging.

And a week after she makes the first tentative inquiries, meets the first ex-LexCorp employee in a quiet shady corner of a city park for a chat, she gets a call from Bruce Wayne.

 

*

 

There's a long awkward moment of silence once she's shown into the lake house, standing there and staring at Wayne across the shiniest glass table she's ever seen.

Lois doesn't mind. She's willing to wait it out if Wayne is.

"Ms. Lane," he says at last, and Lois raises an eyebrow at him. He doesn't sound the way she's expecting—he didn't on the phone, either, quiet and serious and intent. She's never interviewed Wayne before, but she's heard the horror stories from Planet staff who have; Cat Grant seems almost fond of him, in the way you get fond, self-defensive, of things that drive you nuts, and that alone is more than enough to make Lois wary.

But Wayne's just sitting there, sober and attentive, watching her steadily.

"Mr. Wayne," she says. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

She's expecting a little song and dance, some kind of polite fiction. She's not expecting him to wet his lips, look away, and say, "You've been looking into Lex Luthor."

Lois feels her shoulders tense up, and tries to force herself to relax them. "I don't know if you heard," she says, flat, "but he went to prison recently? Big story, the port getting trashed by a radioactive space monster. It's news. I'm a reporter."

"You're not doing it because it's news," Wayne says, almost gently.

"Mr. Wayne—"

"Ms. Lane, I want to help you. And you have no idea precisely how little reason you have to want to help me, but if I'm very lucky, you'll do it anyway."

"Lucky," Lois repeats, and Wayne offers her a half-smile, a sick sad ghost of the one she's used to seeing splashed across the Entertainment & Society section.

"If you'll follow me, Ms. Lane," he murmurs, and that's how she ends up following Bruce Wayne into his creepy basement.

"If this ends with my dead body in a tarp in that lake up there," she mutters, halfway down the industrial metal staircase, "you're not going to get away with it."

Wayne doesn't laugh. He pauses a few steps below her, looking pale and kind of tired. "It won't," he says, low, and for all she knows he's a worse nutjob than Luthor, but she can't help but believe it.

And then they get down a little further, and—

The thing is, he must have taken a lot of precautions. To pull it off for as long as he has, without anybody figuring it out, without anybody even suspecting—he must have a system in place, a cover for each cover with five more alibis underneath. He must be good at this. He must be fucking spectacular.

But the first thing she does, when she realizes what it is she's looking at and what it means, is feel stupid. Had to be someone with a lot of resources, didn't it? A lot of resources, time on his hands, property where his equipment could be kept secure. And she, of all people, had been handed the biggest clue she could have asked for.

"Martha," she says.

Wayne doesn't flinch; he must have been expecting it.

Martha Wayne. Of course. That must have been the last word he'd anticipated hearing from Superman's mouth—what had he thought it meant? Until she'd come running in and told him, until he realized what Clark was actually saying, and then—

Then he'd gone and saved Martha, and called himself Clark's friend. Lois shakes her head and almost wants to laugh; the _nerve_ , after what he'd done. But then she supposes you can't be a shrinking violet, if you've spent ten or twenty years running around and punching people, dressed up like a bat.

And he hadn't been what killed Clark, in the end. He'd—he'd gone to Clark's body, after, found it and helped bring it to Lois.

It's not much, next to what he'd meant to do with that spear if she hadn't interrupted. But it's not nothing.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me," he says, very quietly. "But you want to understand what happened, Ms. Lane, and so do I. You can ask questions I can't ask, go places I can't go—not in daylight, at least. And I—"

"And you've got a few resources of your own, yeah," Lois says, brisk, and comes down the last few steps and past him, looking around the space: the machinery, vehicles, equipment, banks of computer monitors. "I think I follow, Mr. Wayne. And will it be just the two of us, or—"

"No," he says. "But I believe you're already familiar with my other associate."

 

 

**one. (the first time that does count.)**

Wayne's not wrong. When he leads her back a little further—and just how far down does all this _go_ , anyway?—to a smaller workroom with papers stacked across a desk, another bank of monitors full of text, the woman gazing thoughtfully down at one page is immediately recognizable. Her hair is different, her clothes; no sign of that armor, the shield, the sword, or that gleaming lariat she'd wielded.

But it doesn't matter. Her face, her eyes—or maybe the way she holds herself, her shoulders, the unthinking and arresting physical presence. Lois knows it's her right away.

And somehow it must hold true in reverse, because the woman looks up at her and smiles, small but immediate. "Ms. Lane," she says quietly, and rounds the end of the worktable to reach for Lois's hand to shake.

"Lois," Lois says, absent.

"Lois," the woman agrees. "I am Diana. Diana Prince, that is, if you have any need to find me outside this place."

So, fake name, then. Interesting. "And inside this place, you're—?"

"Just Diana." She smiles, a little wider this time.

Lois thinks about that lariat, the brilliant glowing line of it blazing through the dark, and the way Diana had moved at the port—the way she'd caught Clark's body, lowered it steadily down, without any apparent effort or even hesitation.

"Don't tell me you're an alien, too," Lois says aloud.

"Not exactly," Diana says, obliging. "But I'm from somewhere far away, and I cannot go back. So perhaps I'm not so very different."

Lois stares at her. What the hell kind of answer is that? "O—kay. Well, uh. Nice to meet you, I guess."

And maybe among Diana's superpowers is immunity to awkwardness, because all she does is lean in, graceful and earnest, and say, "A pleasure to meet you, as well. Of course I wish the circumstances were not what they are," she adds carefully, and presses her free hand to the back of Lois's. "But I'm sure I speak for Bruce as well in thanking you for your willingness to join us in our work."

Lois isn't quite as certain about that as Diana; but Wayne, still standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, flicks a deliberate glance at Lois and doesn't speak up to object, so maybe Diana's right after all.

"Of course," Lois hears herself say. "I couldn't have—I—I have to know why. I have to know _why_ ," and damn, it comes out awful and scratchy and unsteady, her eyes stinging all at once.

But Diana doesn't let go of her, doesn't ignore it or turn away to give her a moment to collect herself. She looks at Lois, her gaze understanding and endlessly warm, and reaches out to grip Lois's shoulder. "I know," she says softly, "it's all right," and for the first time in days, Lois doesn't mind that she's started crying.

 

 

**two.**

Luthor was into a whole hell of a lot: all kinds of things, endless files to go through, and at least half of it is nonsense. Somehow Wayne got himself access to everything seized in the joint operation between the Metropolis and Gotham PDs to search Luthor's personal offices, and there's a boatload of it.

It's going to be a lot of legwork, in the end. Lois can tell that already. Chasing down the stuff that matters, figuring out who Luthor talked to or where he got it, where he thought it would lead—where it actually leads, for that matter. If she'd had to guess, she'd have thought it would have been Zod's arrival, that worldwide broadcast, that kickstarted the whole thing; but some of the files are older than that. This is an obsession Luthor'd been cultivating for a long time, even if Zod and the Black Zero jolted it into a higher gear.

But before they can dive into that, they have to sort out what's useful from what isn't, see how it all connects or else divide it into separate lines of inquiry.

It takes a while. They fall into something of a routine, Lois and Wayne and Diana. Lois does her cat stories during the day, while Wayne is busy being obscenely rich where everyone can see him and Diana does whatever it is she does, plus or minus a flight to or from Paris. And then, in the afternoons or evenings, on weekends—a carefully randomized schedule, Wayne insists on it—they meet, review another chunk of files, summarize their findings for each other.

And it's awkward, at first. Pennyworth, Wayne's butler, scares the hell out of Lois the first time he shows up at her elbow with a cup of coffee; she hadn't realized he had access to Wayne's whole basement lair. And Wayne—it's hard, for a while, to look at Wayne and see anything except him standing over Clark in the dark with that spear in his hand, grim and murderous.

Except he's not wearing that bulky metal armor, not these days. Suits, most of the time, carefully pressed; and he throws the jackets absently over the backs of chairs, rolls up the sleeves without paying the least attention to the wrinkles, sucks down almost as much black coffee as Lois.

It's hard to despise somebody who looks that tired, whose forehead wrinkles up like that when they concentrate.

And Diana—it shouldn't be, but it's almost as awkward with Diana. Lois doesn't know anything about her; Wayne, Lois has heard of, and she could write a profile on—well, on his public persona, at least—with her eyes shut. She knows about Martha and Thomas, about Wayne Enterprises and the Wayne Foundation. She has some kind of context for who he is, how he fits into the world, and she had it even before she knew he was Batman.

But Diana's a mystery. Lois looks, because of course she does, but Diana Prince has a bland and mostly unremarkable footprint, nothing useful—nothing that can tell Lois what she meant by _somewhere far away_ , by _I cannot go back_. And of course Lois's first instinct is to ask, but that would be rude. Wouldn't it?

Not that it had stopped her, with Clark. She'd tracked him across the country and back, shown up on his mother's doorstep, wouldn't take no for an answer. But then Clark—plus or minus her own curiosity—had gotten her stabbed in the gut. And then laser-cauterized it shut with his eyes. How could anybody have expected her to let that lie?

But Diana doesn't owe Lois anything.

Which is what makes it kind of a surprise when she gives Lois what she's looking for anyway.

 

*

 

It's one of the really late nights. Wayne's off dealing with some Batman bullshit; Lois can, if she tries, catch the low murmur of Pennyworth's voice from the next level down, in touch with Wayne over Batman's comms.

And the wound's still fresh enough that it can take Lois by surprise, the things that make her think of Clark when she isn't braced for it. She's got a printed file in front of her, some official typewritten log from some filing cabinet in one of Luthor's dozen labs, and she's skimming it, about to turn a page, and licks the tip of her finger to catch the paper, and then she thinks: Clark used to do that, sometimes.

Before he died. Before he had that hole punched through him, before he bled all over her hands, before he was gone.

She can't see the page anymore. There's something wrong with her eyes; she squints and tears spill over, hot, and oh. Of course that's what it is. She's an idiot.

She huffs out half a laugh, still crying, and mutters, "Oh, come _on_ ," to herself as she wipes at her face. And then she glances up, belated, and yeah, Diana's looking right at her.

Lois doesn't cry well, she knows as much; she gets blotchy fast. And Diana, she thinks half-resentfully, doesn't really seem like the blotchy type.

There's no way she hasn't noticed. Lois puts her face in her hands and tries to breathe slowly, and braces herself for Diana to be perfect and pitying, gracefully compassionate toward Lois in all her small pathetic sadness. Because Diana is—is so herself, always, everywhere: even bent over the ravings of a mad scientist in Wayne's Bat-basement, Diana has never looked anything less than impeccably untouchable to Lois.

But when Lois does hear something, it's the quiet clunk of Diana's chair settling into place beside her; and when she feels something, it's the warmth of Diana's arm settling carefully around her shoulders.

"I haven't had the opportunity to tell you," Diana murmurs, low. "But I am sorry. I didn't know Clark as well as I would have liked to, and though I know it's nothing next to what you've suffered in losing him—losing the opportunity to know him pains me very much."

Lois presses her fingertips into her eyes and feels a fresh wave of prickling heat sweep up behind them. God—as if that weren't the worst part. She isn't sad for Clark, not really. He's dead; which means he's not in pain, not unhappy. He's all right. It's everything else that hurts: everyone who already knew him, all the days they'll all have to live through that will be so much duller, so much emptier, without him—and everyone who never met him, everyone who never knew him and whose world is diminished without their even knowing it because they never will.

"Thanks," she gasps out—totally inane, but she doesn't know what the hell else to say.

And Diana doesn't seem to mind, because she just squeezes Lois's shoulder a little and doesn't move away.

"I hope it isn't foolish to say this, but I'm glad you chose to come here when Bruce invited you."

Lois sucks in another deep breath, scrubs at her eyes and face and finally manages to look at Diana properly. "You are," she repeats.

"Yes," Diana says. "It would have been easy for you not to, or to leave once you understood what he meant to tell you and not come back. It is," she adds more slowly, "easy to—to make yourself alone, to close your heart up and not come out again."

Lois glances away, swiping at her cheek. She'd like to say she hadn't been, but—but it could have happened that way. Lying to Perry the way she had, and to everybody in the office; sneaking out early to dig into Luthor, giving herself secrets to keep and reasons not to talk to anyone. Making herself alone.

But Wayne happened to her, and now even underground in a concrete bunker at two in the morning—Diana knows. She was there, she saw Clark die, and she knows about Superman. Even when Lois looks fine, Diana knows she isn't, and there's no pretending otherwise. In a weird way, it's almost a luxury.

"You say that like you mean it," Lois mutters.

"I do," Diana says. "I—I was left behind once, too, by someone facing a great danger to save many lives. It was not easy to bear."

And god, Lois could have put up with indifference, disinterest, the placid shallow sympathy of people who've never lost shit—but having Diana, beautiful statuesque impossible Diana, who for all Lois knows is some ten-thousand-year-old goddess of war, look at her and acknowledge how endlessly fucking hard this is—

Lois turns into her all at once, unable to stop it; leans against Diana's sturdy shoulder in whatever five-thousand-dollar dress Diana's wearing today and grabs haphazardly for Diana's free hand—and is caught, gathered carefully closer, Diana's fingers cool and gentle against the nape of Lois's neck.

"It was not easy to bear," Diana repeats, very low, against Lois's temple. "It hurt, and I couldn't stand it, and even now I cannot put it aside or forget it. Even now, that loss is part of me, and in truth I would cling to it with both hands, however deeply it cut, rather than choose to let it go—rather than become whatever whole and unscarred self I would be without it. I loved him, and I lost him, and it hurts."

Strange, Lois thinks distantly, that that should be comforting. Surely she ought to wish Diana'd told her that she'd be fine, that Diana's all better now and that Lois will be too, if she just waits long enough.

But Lois doesn't ask questions because she wants to be told comforting things, after all. She asks questions because she wants to know the truth.

"Yeah, it does," she says into Diana's shoulder, and gets an arm around Diana's side far enough to hug Diana back.

 

 

**three.**

"So, downstairs, right?" Lois hisses over her shoulder, trying to get a decent look down the next hallway.

"Yes," Diana says. "That's where the results and analysis were stored, at least according to Bruce's source."

Lois glances at her and feels the corners of her mouth twitch. She just can't help it: they're in the middle of a secret LexCorp facility, well after hours—definitely not supposed to be here, and if anyone finds them, Lois has no idea how they're going to get out of this.

But Diana looks like a kid in a candy store. Bright-eyed and delighted, and Lois doesn't think she's stopped grinning since she forced the lower-level security door and got them in here.

"Well, this corridor looks clear," Lois says, and Diana tilts her head—double-checking with that Amazon god-child hearing, maybe—and then nods, and together they hurry forward.

Their luck holds pretty well the whole way down to the data storage area. It's about a third of the way back up, an external hard drive shoved into Lois's waistband and two more in her hands, that Diana stops in front of her and then suddenly backs her up against the door of a closed office.

Lois swallows, palms suddenly sweaty around the hard drives; and then she realizes belatedly what the cue must mean, pins one to her side with her elbow and reaches for the door handle. "It's locked," she whispers, when it won't turn all the way under her hand.

"Of course it is," Diana murmurs, in a voice so warm and pleased you'd—

You'd think she were flirting, Lois thinks dimly, and not telling Lois exactly how screwed they are.

Except of course they aren't screwed at all. Diana forces the lock with one sharp shove, metal snapping with a muted noise—and now Lois can hear the security guard, too, the crackle of his radio. Can he hear them back, or was that quiet enough?

Better, of course, not to put it to the test. They slip through the door into the dark office, close it again behind them, and Diana backs herself up against it and wraps a hand around the inside handle so—ah, so if he tests it from the outside it won't open, will feel like it's locked even though it isn't. They're just lucky LexCorp's internal security has long since been deactivated, now that this lab's been seized by the city; there's a keycard slot, a palm scanner, right next to the door, plus or minus half a dozen other measures they'd never have been able to get around.

Lois stays where she is, because the last thing she wants to do is trip over a chair or something and get them caught. They stand there together, six inches apart, looking at each other in the dimness and listening to the security guard stroll past the door with a yawn, murmuring a check-in into his radio.

And then he's gone again, drawing away into the distance, but Diana still doesn't move. "Another few minutes," she says to Lois, very low, "just to be sure he won't turn around or change his route."

Lois can't help but raise an eyebrow at her. "You seem to know a lot about this," she whispers. "You do this kind of thing regularly, back on your Amazon island?"

Diana's grin can't be called anything but bright, even in the dark. "Not _regularly_ ," Diana says. "Just once, really. And that was for a good cause."

"Mmhmm."

"I needed the Godkiller," Diana insists. "Or at least I thought it was the Godkiller at the time, even if it was only a sword. And the armor wasn't strictly necessary, but it was a very good idea, in the end."

"And where exactly were you stealing them from, anyway?"

"The great tower where the treasures of the gods were kept, of course," Diana says, blithe.

So matter-of-fact—she was the first time she told Lois where she'd come from, too, so sober and sincere as she explained that she'd _thought_ her mother had made her from clay, but perhaps Zeus had done it himself, or brought her forth as a child from his forehead, his heart, his liver; it was hard to be sure, but the old stories seemed to imply that that was how these things went.

Lois had nearly laughed, then, but she knows Diana better now. It's of a piece with all the rest of her, the breathtaking beauty and incredible strength, the kindness and clarity and relentless dedication. An impossible thing brought to life; almost too appropriate, Lois thinks, that Diana should have chosen to be called Wonder Woman, because Lois couldn't have picked a better way to describe her with a whole stack of thesauruses.

"I leapt the great ravine," Diana is clarifying, "and caught a ledge—and then it crumbled and I nearly fell, but—" She pauses, and makes such a sheepish face that Lois almost laughs now.

Bad idea, when the guard might still be just around the corner; Lois swallows it into nothing but a huff through her nose, and shakes her head. "But what?"

"But I'm very strong," Diana says, "and I—I punched holds into the stone instead. I can't imagine what Xanthippe must have thought when she saw it. I hope she was able to fix it."

And that's just a little too much. Lois leans in and turns her face into Diana's shoulder to muffle herself, and she can't see Diana's grin anymore but can feel it anyway, the curve of Diana's cheek against her forehead.

 

*

 

They get out the same way they got in. One more close call, just as they're on their way out; Diana had been concentrating on climbing up onto the roof, and so the sudden swinging glare of a flashlight catches both of them by surprise.

And Diana doesn't say anything—only leans down over the edge, holds out her hand, her eyes dark and intent and not the slightest shadow of doubt in her face.

It's right then, reaching up and feeling Diana's fingers close around her wrist, that Lois feels the first real presentiment of a completely different kind of danger. Looking up at Diana through the dark, the brief swooping weightlessness of Diana lifting her—one-armed, effortless—and finding her breath caught in her throat—

Lois has never been afraid of heights. But she's been having nightmares anyway, since it happened, about being up on that tower with Luthor, looking over the edge. About that endless screaming moment of rushing air, and no Clark there to catch her—because how could he, when she watched them put him in the ground?

But Diana lifting her like this is—she remembers what it's like, now, not to be afraid.

She hadn't thought it would matter. It still hurts to wake up alone, to find emptiness next to her instead of Clark. She'd assumed she was pretty much safe.

Except this, right now—the way her heart is pounding, how hard it is to look away from Diana's wide dark eyes, the muscles in her shoulders—

This is starting to make her think that maybe there's a whole different kind of falling she ought to be worrying about.

 

 

**four.**

She tells herself to just be patient. To give herself a chance to work out what this is, how far it goes. It makes you feel absurdly close to people absurdly fast, Lois knows, when you share secrets—especially ones that matter. Hell, she's used that trick more than once to get a source to trust her, to help forge a bond with somebody who might not talk to her otherwise.

And Diana is—Diana is so beautiful. Breathtaking, eyecatching, hopelessly distracting. It's hard to imagine that anyone could look at her and not think even idly about what it might be like to kiss the curve of that lovely generous mouth.

But that doesn't make it a good idea. Even if Diana had ever had the same thought about Lois, that still wouldn't make it a good idea.

Clark's ring lives on Lois's nightstand, now. She'd worn it for a while, but it had started to feel ghoulish, and a little passive-aggressive besides, to do that where Wayne had to keep looking at it. Lois isn't interested in punishing him, and after spending a few months watching him punish himself, she's not even sure it would be necessary.

And she doesn't go a day without thinking of Clark—but maybe she never will. Maybe that's all right. It wasn't that she'd planned to spend the rest of her life crying over him, only that right afterward, no other option had felt possible; but she's getting better now. Luthor's research, these _boxes_ some of his notes keep going on about, and the metahumans he'd been tracking down—it put something out ahead of her that wasn't just an endless march of days without Clark in them.

But that doesn't make this a good idea, either. As if the first thing she should be doing, right when she's finally starting to find her footing, is jump off a whole new cliff—

She's got a lifetime's practice at it, has made a whole career out of getting herself right into the middle of situations other people run the hell away from.

But even she can tell that falling in love with Wonder Woman on the rebound from Superman would be a really, really bad decision.

 

*

 

It's just that it doesn't feel like a rebound. It doesn't feel like a rebound, and in the end it doesn't feel all that much like a decision, either.

Bruce heads off to Iceland in search of one of those metahumans in Luthor's files, and Lois and Diana keep working while he's gone. One night they decide to take Alfred out for a thank-you dinner, after all the cups of hot caffeine he's brought down, the fresh croissants that appear out of nowhere for Diana and the fruit, the little sandwiches, that tend to show up at Lois's elbow. And then—

Well, then they keep doing it. Sometimes Alfred begs off, busy attending to some Wayne Enterprises business, and Diana and Lois go anyway. Diana Prince, it turns out, is renting some excruciatingly expensive suite in Metropolis, and suddenly it becomes almost routine, to spend an evening on the plush leather couch facing Diana's balcony, the city skyline, with their shoes kicked off and a bottle of really good wine left open to breathe on the coffee table.

And they talk. They talk about everything: about Lois's first job right out of college, the trouble she'd gotten in for trying to push a story about local corruption; about her first trip overseas, how sick she'd gotten; about the spark of inspiration that had turned into the story that would land her that Pulitzer. And, of course, about Clark—about tracking him down, about Superman, about being trapped on Zod's ship with nothing but a hologram of Clark's biological father to help her get the hell out of there.

Diana returns the favor with stories about her childhood, her training—interspersed with very seriously-offered advice about horseback riding and archery, despite Lois's laughing insistence that it's wasted on her. About World War I, about Steve Trevor, about all the people she's known and the places she's been; about the Louvre, about art.

There's so much of it—Lois asks her questions, but only once she's already gotten started, picked a subject, because there's still so much Lois doesn't know about her. She's so used to letting Diana choose what to talk about that she doesn't even realize Diana's never mentioned her mother until it happens.

"Hippolyta, that is," Diana clarifies, while Lois is still trying to decide what to say. "I never called her that, but that was her name. Is her name, if she is still alive."

"You don't know?" Lois says, as gently as she can.

Diana's mouth flattens. "I like to think that I would feel it," she says slowly, "that I would know. But it's impossible to be sure. I still think of her, and pray to the gods that she is safe and well—I don't know whether they can do anything about it, when they are dead, but then they are gods, so I think it must be possible. She gave thanks to them, after all, and it was always right after telling me the story of how they had died." Diana sighs, swirling her wine absently in its glass. "I loved that story."

"Yeah, that's kids for you," Lois agrees. "Morbid as hell."

Diana tips her head back and laughs, and Lois looks out over the balcony so she can't end up staring at Diana's throat instead. "It's true. Oh, how I loved the thought of battle, when I was a girl! I often ran away from my lessons, and I would sneak down to the training yards to watch my sisters fight. I was the only child there, so much smaller and weaker than the rest of them—I longed to be one of them, to be fast and strong and worthy, to achieve some epic glory."

It's all too easy to imagine, really. Lois has seen how Diana looks when she's getting away with something, the perfect marble beauty of her face suddenly alive with bright mirth—that must be just what she had looked like as a girl, running from her tutor, crouched along some walltop with her eyes alight, watching the other Amazons spar.

"And your mother—?"

"Disapproved, of course," Diana says, but it doesn't dampen her smile. "She always caught me in the end, and she gave very thorough scoldings. But she was fair, most of the time. And—" Diana pauses, looks away and shakes her head, and now, at last, the smile fades. "I didn't truly understand her, when I was a child. I thought she didn't understand me, that she was being shortsighted and unkind."

"Ruining your life," Lois supplies, and Diana grins at her again for a moment.

"Just so," she agrees. "It made no sense to me, then, how she worried for me. I had lived all my life in such safety—I had thought about it so much, imagined it so often, that I was sure I knew what it meant to be in peril, and sure that I could bear it."

"And then you walked into the middle of World War I," Lois murmurs.

Diana looks away again, and her gaze goes distant; her eyes are directed toward the balcony, the lights of Metropolis below them, but Lois is pretty sure she's seeing something else entirely. "Yes," she says at last. "The day I left, she told me—she told me I had been her greatest love, and that now I was her greatest sorrow. I did not understand it then."

And Lois can't do anything with that but reach for her, wrap a hand around Diana's on the wineglass and lean close, until their shoulders touch. She thinks absently of sitting in the Batcave that once, licking her finger and crying about it, and the half-resentful way she'd told herself Diana wouldn't really understand—that immaculate Diana must never have known what it felt like to sob alone in the dark.

What an idiot she'd been.

"If she knew what you'd done," she hears herself say quietly, "and who you were, who you've become—she'd be proud of you, Diana. I'm sure she would."

Diana turns her head, and they're—they're very close now, Lois thinks stupidly. They're very close, and Diana's eyes are wide and dark, and her hand is steady under Lois's on the wineglass, steady and warm and strong. It would be nice, if the impact of her face and attention and sheer—sheer _presence_ could be diminished, eased even a little bit, by her bare feet or the way the neckline of her dress has gone askew, the disheveled fall of her hair.

But it turns out that none of that is helping at all, and then Lois is—kissing her.

It's not on purpose, or at least it doesn't feel like it. Surely if there had been a moment to spare, some kind of meaningful gap between Lois staring at her and their mouths touching, Lois would have used it to not make a huge mistake. But that doesn't happen, and Lois's free hand has somehow managed to find Diana's shoulder, and that small sound, that soft caught breath, is—is _Diana's_ , it must be.

And then Diana breaks away, turns her head and wets her lips and says very carefully, "Lois," and yes, there it is: the huge mistake, the awful sinking knowledge that it got made.

"Oh, shit," Lois says. "That was—sorry. Sorry," and she gets her hands safely off Diana, stands up and moves away. Her purse, her jacket, and where the hell did she put her shoes?

"No, wait. Lois—"

"That wasn't supposed to happen," Lois tells Diana, not looking at her—because that's part of how this happened. Looking at Diana, especially after a couple glasses of wine, is clearly not a good idea. "Especially not right after talking about your—your Schroedinger's mother and her last words to you before you left your home forever. Not that there was ever going to be a good time for it, but that was _really_ bad—"

"Lois," Diana says again, more quietly, and she's caught up to Lois somehow—well, superspeed, obviously, Lois reminds herself. She's caught up to Lois, curled a hand around Lois's wrist, and she wouldn't stop Lois if Lois pulled away from her, she'd let go, but Lois doesn't move. "It's all right, I promise."

Lois risks a glance, and Diana meets her eyes, smiles as if to reward her for it. She reaches out and Lois's heart does an unbidden jackknife in her chest—but it's only to rest gentle fingertips against Lois's cheek, to skim a stray lock of hair back into its proper place behind Lois's ear.

"Please believe me when I tell you I consider it a compliment," Diana says, very low. "A compliment I dearly appreciate, even if I cannot accept it."

Lois closes her eyes, and swallows.

"But giving a friend a compliment," Diana adds after a moment, "is no reason for you to feel yourself unwelcome. Stay, Lois. Stay a little longer, and we'll talk about something else and part well, and then see each other tomorrow. All right?"

Another bad idea. But then, Lois thinks, another half-hour isn't going to make her pine over Diana any more recklessly than she already is. "All right," she says at last, and lets Diana draw her back over toward the goddamn couch.

 

 

**five.**

She doesn't mean to bring it up.

It doesn't even get brought up, as such. They're not talking about it at all—they're talking about Bruce, who came back from Iceland and told Diana he hadn't been able to get Arthur Curry to agree to much of anything, and then had gone down and shut himself up in one of the lowest levels of the Cave that there is.

Punishing himself again, Lois assumes, and she says as much to Diana, and somehow that turns into wondering aloud how Diana had ever started working with him in the first place.

"I'm not entirely certain either," Diana murmurs, with a slanted little smile. "One of the first things I said to him was that he was like a little boy, no natural inclination to share. And he hasn't gotten much better at it with time."

"Even when I thought he was just Bruce Wayne," Lois says, "I can't say he ever struck me as much of a team player."

"No," Diana agrees. "But in a sense, at least to me, that almost makes it more important that he tries anyway. He does his best, even when his best is not very good." Her tone gets wry, amused, over the last few words, and she grins at Lois and shakes her head. But she still has her hand spread out across some of Luthor's papers, and she glances down at them and lets the smile fall away. "It's one of the things that makes it impossible for me to leave humanity alone," she adds, after a moment. "Even when I wish to. So many of you _try_ so hard, and so often you are your own worst enemies."

Lois looks away. "Yeah," she says, hoping her voice will stay level. "We do have a way of making mistakes, even when we don't intend to."

"Ah," Diana says, "but that is hardly unique to your kind."

Lois thinks about Clark—about Zod, about the rest of them, and decides she can't really argue.

"There was a time when I thought that it was," Diana is adding, more slowly. "That you were flawed, fundamentally, and that if you were willing to destroy yourselves then it was only as much as you deserved, that you should be allowed to go ahead and do it."

Lois swallows. "Well, I'm not sure any of us could have blamed you for it," she says, but even before she's finished the sentence, Diana is shaking her head, unhesitating.

"No. No, that was foolish of me, foolish and selfish. A mistake of my own," Diana emphasizes, "and one I've tried to make sure never to repeat. I hope not only to protect people from each other, but to protect them from themselves—to protect them from committing errors they could not then bring themselves to forgive."

 

*

 

So it's not that it's about the kiss at all. It's just—

It's just that it makes Lois think of it. It's just that she can't stop. Something about the look on Diana's face both times, the gentle but inexorable determination in her expression. The way she'd said _even if I cannot accept it_ —and maybe it's just Lois playing at semantics, grasping at straws, but _cannot_ isn't _don't want to_. And then _foolish_ , _foolish and selfish_ , _a mistake I've tried to make sure never to repeat_.

It makes Lois flush a little, awkward heat in her cheeks and the strong urge to roll her eyes at herself. Like there's any reason to assume that she herself is something Diana—Diana!—might be tempted to be selfish about.

But it's possible. Isn't it?

She'll never know if she doesn't ask. And if there's one thing in the world Lois knows she's good at, it's asking questions.

 

 

**and one.**

She doesn't let herself overthink it. That Diana's insisted nothing has to change, and that they should go on the same way they had before, makes it easier—they still spend all kinds of time together, even when half of it is crouched over Lex Luthor's cryptic bullshit a quarter mile underground.

They have leads on some of the others, Victor Stone and Barry Allen, even if nothing came of the trip to Iceland, and Lois is in touch with a couple people in Central City who should have a lead for her to pass on to Bruce within a few days. Against all odds, they might actually be able to make sure something worthwhile comes of all Luthor's conspiracy-mongering monomania.

And then, as they're wrapping up for the evening, Lois asks Diana whether she's been to that new pizza place on 8th Avenue, and within half an hour, they're sitting next to each other in a shiny red booth splitting the results of a lengthy discussion and carefully beaten-out compromise: an enormous bacon and black olive with spinach, feta, and extra cheese.

"So," Lois says, and then has to pause to wipe a little stray sauce from the corner of her mouth. Maybe she should've picked another time for this—but then again, if Diana's going to turn her down for being overambitious about the amount of pizza she can fit in her mouth, maybe that's for the best.

Diana's mouth is full, but she raises her eyebrows inquiringly.

"I've got something I need to ask you. About—the other evening," and hell, she's already stumbling, but Diana's expression, the sudden intensity in her gaze, says Lois doesn't need to clarify any more than that anyway. "I apologized and I meant it, because that really wasn't the best time for something like that. But I—it wasn't a _mistake_. And definitely not one I wouldn't be able to forgive myself for. What you said the other week," she adds, "it made me think—I just wanted to be sure you knew that. That it wasn't the kind of error you need to try to protect me from."

And now she's trapped both of them, because Diana clearly wants to answer but she's still chewing—Lois can't help it, she laughs, and it comes out a little strained, a little high-pitched, but it's just so silly. Of all the things she could confound Wonder Woman with: a clumsy unplanned kiss, and pizza.

When Diana's finally managed to swallow, she grins too, helpless. And then her smile softens, smaller but no less warm, and she's looking at Lois so intently Lois can feel the skin at the nape of her neck prickling, her throat suddenly dry.

"I was pleased," Diana admits, low. "When you kissed me—that you wanted to. That pleased me, and I was glad." She looks away, then, and bites her lip. "But I told you that I know what it is to be left, and to struggle with it afterward. I know it can't have been easy for you. I didn't—I couldn't trust my own judgment, because it was clear to me then that you make me want to be selfish."

And god, what a thing that is to hear Diana say, better than Lois could possibly have imagined. But the way she's pausing— "And?" Lois says.

"And," Diana goes on after a moment, very quietly, "if you had decided it was a mistake, if you had regretted it and it pained you, to have touched me—I couldn't have borne it."

And that's—Lois can't bear _not_ to be touching her anymore, has to lean in and skim a hand against her cheek, her hair. "Diana," she murmurs, and brushes her mouth against Diana's; once, and then again, and then she can't help but press in deeper for a moment, taste—

—well, pizza, of course. But it tastes even better off the curve along the inside of Diana's lower lip.

And, better still than that, this time Diana kisses her back.

After a moment, though, she breaks away. "Lois, are you certain? I only mean to say—"

"Diana," Lois interrupts, settling her arms a little more comfortably around Diana's neck. "Don't you think we've talked enough?"

And Diana smiles at her, slow and a little wry. "Perhaps we have," she says, low, and tugs Lois in with a hand on her cheek to kiss her again.

 

 


End file.
